It’s striking how enduring the logframe has been. Perhaps because many organisations were smaller and more centralised then, adoption was easier. Or perhaps once embedded in donor systems, it was too difficult to dislodge. It often feels like an attempt to nail spaghetti to a wall — to force complex, relational, adaptive work into a linear accountability framework.
If we want the people to be resilient, how can we build a vision of evaluating that based on well-being? How can we measure resilience? How can we measure happiness? How can we measure some of these really extraordinary indicators?
On 9th May 2023, the Global Fund for Community Foundation hosted a meeting with Deepthy Menon in conversation with Barry Knight on Measuring What Matters. The following are extracts from the meeting repurposed into a written Q&A to extend this conversation to a wider audience.
We were unhappy with the current system, which is extractive and reductive in terms of capturing the complexity of our work. Moreover, it was also unaffordable to us: there is an entire industry of monitoring and evaluation that has a standard of payment that we would never be able to meet. But we also did not want to simply do a cheaper version of the conventional model. We needed to develop a new paradigm.
